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So, I'm going to start by acknowledging that, while I'm generally not a fan of 8th edition in a whole bunch of ways, some of that is just personal taste. I was a big fan of the way that 7th edition worked, and losing a lot of elements that were problematic but fun (Like blast templates) seems like a big step in the wrong direction to me. For many players, those kinds of changes aren't going to be a problem, though. That's just me, not being catered to, because GW has decided that their target audience is elsewhere. I can't really fault them for that, even if it's personally frustrating.

Anyways...

As of yesterday, I got my hands on the Forge World indexes, and they're an absolute... Well, I would like to use a lot of creative vulgarity to describe how bad they are, but it'd all a bunch of squiggles, asterisks, and ampersands. It's bad. It's REALLY bad. Broken rules, bad typos, unplayable models, special rules that have no function, huge imbalance between itself and the GW books, missing wargear choices. On top of this, there are units missing - Mega dreads come to mind, but there are several others. The book reads like a first draft. The Imperial Armor: Astartes book is the only one I got for myself, but I've seen friends' copies of the other three, and they're all just as bad. (As an aside, the books also feel cheap - The cover art is recycled and uses white Arial text for its title, and unlike the GW indexes, they couldn't even spring for a splash page or a page of flavor text here or there to break up the endless pages of rules - The Astartes book is half the length of any of the GW indexes, too, so it's not like they were just out of room.)

There are some broken GW rules as well, though nothing so egregious as this. Still, I'm going to mention them here - Missing wargear options, weird imbalances in point cost for some things, various nerfs and buffs that seem unfair in various directions, and lots of various army comp choices and tactical options that are missing. (Oh, and as a minor point, the Chaos Vindicator is identical in stats to a regular Vindicator, but has a Power Level of 11 instead of 8. For some reason.)

And whenever I bring this up to apologists, the response I almost invariably get is that "They'll fix it later", either in an FAQ, or in a Chapter Approved, or when Codices come out, or when they do an update. And I'm getting *sick* of hearing that.

Games Workshop is asking money for their products right now, which means that they think that their products are in a state that is worthy of being sold. I understand that they cannot possibly do the amount of playtesting necessary to perfectly balance a game of this scale on their own, which is why I'm not upset about certain questionable balance decisions, but that's no excuse for some of the simply obvious mistakes that have been made in many, many cases. I, a random customer with no background in game design, should not be able to look at a book and see obvious, major imbalances in the effectiveness of some units (Cough*Acts of Faith*Cough). I should especially not be able to look at a rule and immediately see that it doesn't function when there are at least theoretically supposed to be teams of people who are paid to do this for a living. (I can't say for sure, though, because FW stopped accrediting writers.)

Not to mention that GW's fixes of late haven't... really... Been very good. Every broken thing about 7th edition hasn't been rebalanced, it's had a baseball bat taken to its kneecaps so that it'll never walk again. It gives the sense that GW is less concerned with balance and more concerned with showing off that they are trying to fix things. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe they'll stop doing this, but right now I'm under the impression that when it comes time to Start Fixing Things, they'll give a nominal effort to correcting all of the literally broken rules, then take anything that was still overpowered and triple its point cost so that it'll never see the light of a competitive game again.

Games Workshop should fix their products *before* shipping out print copies of books, not after, and I'm honestly surprised that this seems like a radical opinion to some people.